A blockchain firm has announced a deal with Sega to bring one of the latter’s “popular” properties to a Web3 gaming platform.
Line Next, a Korean company that is “focused on growing the global NFT business”, has announced that it’s to make a Web3 game based on one of Sega’s “classic games”.
“Through the agreement, LINE NEXT will receive the license to utilize one of SEGA’s immensely popular game IPs and develop it into a Web3 game,” reads a release on the company’s website (via VGC). “LINE NEXT will showcase this new title in GAME DOSI and support NFT production, digital payments, and marketing activities, as part of LINE NEXT’s plans to popularize Web3 gaming. Further details about the title will be revealed at a later date.”
Launched in May this year, Game Dosi is, according to Line Next, “a Web3 gaming platform that provides user- and game-centered services under the slogan ‘Gamer First, Webs3 Next.”
Visit its website, and you’ll get a better idea of what its idea of Web3 gaming looks like. One title is Frame Arms Girl Dream Stadium, which is a third-person roguelite game where you guide scantily-clad anime girls around procedurally-generated levels, shooting enemies until numbers stop flying out of them. Characters have names like Materia and Innocentia, and have ominous mottoes like, “I’m going to tease you so much.”
Because Frame Arms Girl is a blockchain-based game, costumes are sold as NFTs – now sold out, these costumes were sold off at $60 a piece. Bargain.
Other games on the Game Dosi site include Project GD, which looks like a fantasy card game in the vein of Hearthstone, but with in-game items again being sold as NFTS with prices ranging from $3 up to $300.
Then there’s Sweet Monster Guardians, which appears to be some sort of casual clicker experience where you can buy in-game characters (or ‘Bluemon’ as the site calls them) for as much as $600 per piece. Again, bargain.
The Sega collaboration has emerged mere days after Sega COO Shuji Utsumi announced his company’s plans to “withhold its biggest franchises from third-party blockchain gaming projects.”
We can only wonder what Line Next’s people in suits would have made of Utsumi’s comment that “The action in play-to earn games is boring.”
We also wonder whether Utsumi got the memo that one of his firm’s “classic games” was being turned into exactly the kind of “third-party blockchain” project that he considers so tedious.
Then there’s the question of which Sega property will have the honour of being turned into a money-gobbling NFT web3 blockchain venture. Golden Axe? Crazy Taxi? Our money’s on Alex Kidd. Once Sega’s mascot before he was laid off and replaced by Sonic the Hedgehog, he has to be one of the most unlucky fictional characters in gaming. If anyone was going to get drawn into a get-rich-quick scheme, months after the bubble burst, it’s surely Alex Kidd.
